DFER Scrambles for Leverage

Camp Philos was not so swank this year.

In previous years, the Very Deeply Thoughty reformster retreat has taken place at luxurious retreat locations. But this year the Festival of Reforminess was held in Philadelphia in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention.

That makes a certain amount of sense because Camp Philos is a project of the Democrats for Education Reform, and DFER is a project of hedge fund guys like Whitney Tilson. DFER does not adhere to some traditional Democratic positions; they have, for instance, a deep disdain for the teachers unions. And when it comes to education reform policies like charter schools, DFER is indistinguishable from the ed reform wing of the GOP.

That's not entirely a surprise. Here's what Tilson once had to say about how he decided to put the D in DFER:

The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…

DFER's been having a bad couple of weeks. The first draft of the democratic platform suited them just fine, but then the final draft included some new language, language that in particular tightened the noose on charter schools. From unconditional support of charters, the platform committee moved to requirements such as saying that charters "should not replace or destabilize traditional public schools" and must take their fair share of students with disabilities and English Language Learners.

The tweaks were small but significant, and DFER and other charter supporters howled like stuck pigs. For the past few weeks, readers must constantly be reminded with frequent references to DFER chief Shavar Jeffries' assertion that the platform was "hijacked" and an "unfortunate departure from President Obama's historic education legacy." Other DFERsters like Peter Cook were not just alarmed that the the platform was rolling back (however slightly) charter support, but that the Democratic Party was listening to the teachers unions. Imagine that!

There's reason to question just how much DFER and their brethren are over-reacting. The DNC also held up Cory Booker as an exemplar of Democratic swellness, and on education, Booker is exactly the kind of politician that DFER can love, all in for charters and dismissive of teachers and their unions. The Clinton camp dispatched senior policy advisor Ann O'Leary to Camp Philadelphilos to reassure DFER that Clinton had not abandoned them. She also floated the popular recycled talking point that No Child Left Behind was kind of awesome and totally helped accountability by finding all the schools that were having trouble, which is as big a slab of unvarnished baloney as you'll find anywhere in reformerdom. Most notably, Clinton herself has been walking a line designed to avoid upsetting either teachers or charteristas, and the Democrat campaign has gone back to focusing strictly on pre-K and college, completely dodging that K-12 education issues that are everyone's Big Concern.

And DFER has held onto one of their most valuable and mysterious assets-- the general assumption that DFER deserves a Seat at the Table. From Molly Knefel's coverage of Camp Phildephilos:

Early in the day, panel moderator Jonathan Alter asked how Clinton differs from Obama on education policy. Ben LaBolt, former National Press Secretary for Obama for America, replied: "The Clinton campaign has said they're going to have a seat at the table for everyone in the party who works in education. That means reformers will have a seat at the table, that means the unions will have a seat at the table." The important thing, he quipped, is that "the unions don't get all the seats at the table -- just one of the seats."

This remains one of the most bizarre features of the Age of Reform. Lots of folks have just walked in off the street and demanded a Seat at the Education Table. There's never been anything quite like it. No civilians stomp into a McDonalds corporate meeting and says, "Okay, I've got some ideas about menu that you must listen to." No average citizen walks into a hospital board meeting and says, "Here's the rules you need to follow for providing patient care." No batch of teachers crashes a hedge fund business meeting and says, "Okay, here's how you must conduct your investment strategy."

But education is plagued by a wide assortment of people who have a Seat at the Education Table because they have declared that they do. And now DFER is having a cow because educators want a Seat at the Education Table, as if reformsters were not only entitled to all the seats but also owned the table.

DFER is tugging hard on its Democratic Party leash without tugging so hard that they break the rope entirely. Here's a warm fuzzy Shavar Jeffries quoted at Hechinger Report trying to concern-troll the issue:

“We bring criticism of the platform as a family member questions the misconduct of a fellow family member,” responds Shavar Jeffries, president of DFER. “We bring criticism to push the party to be true to the values it has embodied historically. Others may raise questions to undermine the forward progress of the party; we bring criticism to accelerate it.”

We're just attacking the party for its own good. But Andre Perry challenges DFER to earn its D, noticing what many of us have been noticing for the past few years:

When Democrats changed the platform, it was a political victory for those who repudiated the brand of reform that DFER promotes. The change was a result of real political work, and they are changes designed to get Hillary Clinton elected. Isn’t that the goal of a platform?

Check the last mid-term elections. Education reform was a liability for Democrats. But Republicans could lump vouchers and charters in a “choice” package in which Dems, because of their deep embrace of the term, have been unable to differentiate themselves from their Republican colleagues. In addition, Republican governors have been able to flip-flop on Common Core with little consequence from Democrats primarily because of the manner in which teachers and unions have been attacked.

And Perry asks the $60 million question:

But when “Democrats” is in the name, there’s a different expectation. The name assumes a willingness to work within the political process. If DFER can’t differentiate itself from other like-minded groups then it should simply be For Education Reform.

DFER has been able to pass itself off as Democratic all this time because so many Democrats have gone the neo-liberal route, embracing conservative, business-friendly, teacher-hostile, public school destructive policies. Any shift in party policy will force outfits like DFER to signal whether they are more about the D or the R.

Common Core Defenders Still Flailing Away

I think of Common Core defenders as a little like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster-- folks kind of believe they're out there, but only a handful of folks will admit to having seen them.

After all, neither major party will admit to loving the Core any more, and lots of policy folks have adopted the more generic and less civilian-alarming "college and career ready" for describing any kind of standardy stuff we're trying to push. Charter purveyors have learned they don't have to back the Core to succeed, and most everyone else has determined that the mere use of the term raises so much squawking that it's just better to keep quiet. The Gates Foundation slowed spending on the Core way down, with just one grant awarded in 2016.

And yet, every once in a while, like dust bunnies before a vacuum cleaner on a hardwood floor, the CC supporters come running out.

This time, the vacuum cleaner was a New York Times op-ed by Diane Ravitch. The piece really had nothing all that new or novel to say-- the Common Core cost taxpayers a buttload of money, and it hasn't helped students a bit. But, perhaps predictably, some folks popped right up to defend the still-useless set of standards.

The Collaborative for Student Success went with a listsicle of nine times they thought Ravitch was wrong in the NYT piece.

These included old standards like "they aren't really national" and "they aren't really curriculum," not acknowledging that both of those ideas are out in the world because back in the day, Core supporters put them there. It is true that, as of today, the Core are not quite national standards-- but they were always supposed to be. The whole notion was that CCSS would "fix" education by ensuring that students in Iowa and Alabama would be on the same page when it came to math and reading instruction. Students, we were told, would be able to move across state lines without losing an educational step. In fact, Collabroative for Student Success's website starts its page about the Common Core like this--

Recognizing the value and need for consistent learning goals across states...

And a paragraph later follows up with this:

The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live.

That language, very common with CCSS supporters, promises a national curriculum. It always has.

CSS repeats other standard talking points. "CCSS and the tests that come with them are necessary to find and fix achievement gaps." Nope. Not needed for either. We have always known where the low-achieving, underfunded, undersupported schools are. In many cases, the Big Standardized Tests have confirmed that information, but, more importantly, in almost no cases, that knowledge has not been followed by a state or city saying, "Now that we've found our problem spots, we will focus resources, money, teachers and support to help those schools better serve their students."

Instead, the response has most often been, "Look! A failing school! We must hand it to turnaround experts or close it and replace it or surround it with charters." The focus is not on treating the school as a project to be improved, but rather transforming it into an opportunity for someone to make money.

As Ravitch says, and as CSS fails to refute, the Core simply hasn't worked. After seven years, there is not a school anywhere in the country where reformsters can point and say, "Look! The Core has transformed this from a problem school into an exemplar of Core-ified excellence."

Not that they don't occasionally try. But we'll get back to that.

There are reasons that the one-two punch of Common Core Standards and BS Testing have failed to improve US education. There are many reasons, in fact, but let's just focus on a couple of the big ones.

First, the BS Tests are crap. And that matters because in a sense, CSS is correct-- the Core is not a curriculum. It's the tests that are the curriculum. And it's a lousy curriculum. The tests do not accurately measure what they claim to measure. The tests are like a guy who promises to tell you everything you need to know about your potential neighbor or hiree or mate by weighing that person. "Chris weighs about 160 pounds," say the BS Test guy, "so Chris will probably not make a good spouse."

Second, because school districts quickly learned that the test is the curriculum, and the one thing for which they will be held accountable, here, now, in 2016, "Common Core Standards" is a meaningless phrase. Or, more precisely, it means so many things that it means nothing. It means anything. That means I can give the Core the blame or the credit for anything.

Today's NYT letter column flushed out some more Common Core Dust Bunnies, including the governor of Delaware who wants to sell the long-debunked claim that teachers helped write the Common Core standards. Well, we are all entitled to our fulfilling fantasies. Please nobody tell him about Santa Claus.

But the letters also predictably flushed out someone like Chris Hayes, an experienced classroom teacher in Reno, NV, who is also a Core Advocate with the core advocacy group, Student Achievement Partners (which means she's written this kind of letter a few times before).

Hayes offers the kind of letter (albeit, at a brisk NTY-friendly length) a thousand times before (and before)-- awesome things are happening in my classroom, like discussions and reading, because of the Core. Also, we don't do test prep.

I don't think so.

With all due respect to Hayes (and after twenty-one years in a real classroom, I believe she is due some respect), I have been asking the same two questions since Common Core cheerleading first cropped up. Here are my two questions for anyone touting the joys of Common Core:

1) What were you not doing before that you were suddenly able to do because of Common Core?

2) If Common Core were erased from your state today, what would you have to stop doing in class tomorrow?

After several years, I still don't have an answer to either question. And while it's not her fault that her letter is so short, Hayes does not offer anything remotely like an answer. Her letter could be used to defend a public school that refuses Common Core. It could be used to defend the practice of feeding students cake for breakfast.


Erika Sanzi, who can sometimes occupy the frothing reformster wing of the ed debate (I myself prefer the blustery asshole for public ed wing), picked up the Hayes letter and threw it at Ravitch, taking her to task for leaving out "the opinions of countless teachers who spend their days teaching precisely what she uses misinformation to condemn." But that leads us straight to the other huge reason that I believe the Common Core debates are essentially over.

I will bet you dollars to donuts that there are exactly zero teacher teaching "precisely" what the Common Core requires.

Zero.


What "countless teachers" are doing is what their professional judgment tells them is best. And what those same teachers have learned is that aligning your instruction to the standards is just paperwork.

I can take any unit I have ever taught in the last thirty-five years and make it Common Core ready without doing a single thing except saying, "Okay, this unit hits the following standards." Hell, there are now handy software packages out there that just let me hit a drop down menu, click on some standards, and voila! My teaching is now aligned to the Core.

CSS trots out a couple of examples of great teacher projects (a banana calculator and a hip-hop literature class), but as always, there's absolutely no reason to believe that Common Core has anything to do with those pieces of instruction. CSS wants to link those to an emphasis on critical thinking, but Common Core not only didn't invent critical thinking, but it doesn't call for it.


Maybe I teach from the book, and the book may even have a big fat "Common Core Ready" or "Common Core Aligned" or "Common Core Super-Duper Compliantly Swellified," but we already know that almost all every textbook out there fails to a lesser or huger degree to actually be aligned to the Core. Because here's the thing-- anybody can say they are doing something that is Common Core aligned. Anybody.

States have created their own modified versions of the standards, and they've done it for largely political reasons, so the modifications range from changing the numbering system to adding Really Important Things like a requirement to learn longhand.

Meanwhile, teachers who are even sort of trying to implement the standards have been busy filling in the gaps. The ELA standards are empty vessels, with complete disregard for content, so teachers have mostly decided to fill in the giant gaping void in the center of the reading and writing standards. Meanwhile, other well-meaning teachers have done a year or two of following the text or the standards and have-- as actual professional teachers always do-- modified what they do from year to year.

And those are just the teachers who tried to make a good-faith effort to follow the standards. That's not counting other animals in the educational bestiary, like the superintendents who had their own ideas about what the standards meant, or the consultants called in to help "unpack" the standards who did it in their own particular way. Or the cranky old teachers who looked at the standards and said, "Well, screw this. This is junk" and have actively worked against them ever since-- and that's before they figured out that they could just use paperwork to align their materials.

Even the most compliant, best-intentioned CCSS teachers have "interpreted" or "unpacked" or "surely this is what they meant" their way to their own personal version of the standards.

And why not? Who exactly is there to check anyone's work, to maintain and oversee the integrity or consistency of the Core? The guys who created it finished the work and then bolted immediately for jobs in the private sector. If you want to call the central Common Core office to report a problem or ask permission for a change, there is nobody to call. There is nobody out there, anywhere, looking over state or school district shoulders to say, with real authority, "Yes, that's exactly it" or "No, you're off track." And because the Core were issued with instructions that they must not be changed or altered in any way, even an honest, well-intentioned "fix" represents an unauthorized change, an attack on the CCSS purity.

Bottom line. The Common Core standards are meaningless, and there isn't a teacher in the nation who is actually following them in a true and absolute fashion. Yes, there are still states and districts that are using something they call Common Core as a combination straightjacket and club with which to hamstring teachers. And there are undoubtedly districts and teachers who have put together a good educational program, convinced themselves it has something to do with Common Core, and done some good work.

But Common Core is, at this point, a useless term. Unfortunately, to get to this point, we had to waste billions of dollars and inflict a program of toxic testing on children in this country. CSS went with the old "well, we have to wait" argument, echoing Bill Gates comment that it might take a decade to see if this stuff works. Nope. The Core were rushed together by a bunch of educational amateurs, who were sure we couldn't wait another second to implement them because they would improve education immediately. They didn't, and there's no reason to believe that there will ever be actual improvement to come from the standards-- only the illusion of improvement if teachers continue to come up with newer, better techniques and give the Core credit for them.

The dust bunnies can keep popping out to defend it, but like dust bunnies, the Core has less and less substance and definition, and is ultimately best destined for the dust bin of history.

ICYMI: All of July Edition

It's been a few weeks since I had a reading list for you, and this is certainly not the complete list of what I could recommend, but there are still only so many hours in a Sunday.

Tea Party Charter Leader Admits Becoming a Cyber School Was Simply a Way To Get a Charter

From Eclectablog, which should be on your must-read list, one more example of how the charter sector (particularly in Ohio) is a playground for charlatans and bunko artists. This at least qualifies as a slightly new manner of fraud...

Read Like Detective

Another excellent article from the "Why Common Core Sucks" genre. You know most of these pieces, but Johnathan Chase finds a good way to put them together and connect the dots.

Trump: Tribune of Poor White People

This interview with J.D.Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, is not just an excellent explanation of why Trump keeps winning, but is also a sharp look at the culture of poor, white poverty in this country.

Inequality Is for Winners

Jennifer Berkshire's interview with Tom Frank, author of Listen, Liberal, is a good companion piece to the previous article on the list.


Is Plagiarism Really a Big Deal?

This is a double-win, because it's Nancy Flanagan, and she references a piece by Paul Thomas. While the hook is recent issues with the P word, she connects this to the kind of ethical issues we deal with in any classroom where students can steal ideas or writing (aka "most of them")

Understanding KIPP Model Charter

Jim Horn here shares the entire second chapter from his book Work Hard, Be Hard, a look at the world of No Excuses teaching. It's sobering and scary and helps answer the question, "How bad can it be, really?"

Students Broken Moral Compasses

Teacher Paul Barnwell looks at what the test-driven education revolution has cost us in student moral education.

School Funding and Presidential Hypocrisy

So once again, politicians and their children are saying, "Poor kids should have the same choices rich kids do," which sounds pretty, but as Jersey Jazzman shows, it's empty noise unless we talk about what that would actually cost. Over at EdWeek, Andrew Ujifusa takes a look at the same issue-- so you can get a good hard, two-headed look at what it would really cost to actually do this.

Have Obama's Education Policies Weakened the Democratic Party


A pretty blunt look at Obama ed policies and how they damaged the traditional Democratic Party relationship with education.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

Bianca Tanis gives the most complete look at the new NY test result numbers-- and how big a mess the whole thing is.

Pence and ALEC

Yes, if you read here, you undoubtedly read Diane Ravitch. But don't let this quick piece get lost in the shuffle, reminding us that ALEC has some big dogs in play in this election.

Love Letter to My Dead Student

A guest writer at Edushyster delivers this heart-thumping piece.  

$tand For Children: The Astroturfing of Advocacy

Stand For Children's pedigree is impeccable. It's twenty year history begins with a huge June rally in DC, where 250,000 people did, indeed, stand up for children. Geoffrey Canada and Rosa Freaking Parks spoke. Time Magazine did a follow-up interview with child advocate and activist Marion Wright Edelman. Edelman was the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar, and in 1973 she founded the Children's Defense Fund.

Edelman's son Jonah* (his father worked for Robert Kennedy) teamed up with Eliza Leighton to work on that rally, and immediately after, they launched Stand For Children. This was Edelman's first big project; he had received his B.A. in History with a concentration on African-American studies from Yale University in 1992, then landed a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, earning his Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Politics in 1994 and 1995.

The organization kicked off with rallies all over the country, and launched as a chain of local, grass roots chapters.In a press release for the 1999 Stand For Children Day, we can see the organization spread over "1,500 volunteer-led events" calling for things like greater funding for pre-school. The priorities of SFC in those days were pretty simple:

• Health coverage for uninsured children
• Monitoring the impact of welfare reform
• More money for affordable, high-quality child care
• Safe and productive after-school activities
• Schools that have small classes, well-trained teachers, high standards, and involved parents.

But by the late 00s, something was happening to Stand For Children.

One thing that was happening was huge truckloads of money from the Gates and Walton foundations. Stand For Children was making a whole lot of interesting new friends, and their old friends, including parents like Susan Barrett, were noticing:

I think about the visits from the Policy Director of the New Teacher Project, and the former aide to New York City charter operator, Eva Moskowitz, who said she was moving to Portland and trying to set up a chapter of Democrats for Education Reform, the pro-charter, hedge-fund driven organization.  I think about their push for Oregon to submit a Race to the Top application, (which the state did initially, but it failed); and how the organization acted as the “social justice partner “of Waiting for Superman. and urged parents to attend the film. Only recently did I come to realize that the SFC Portland Director, Tyler Whitmire, is the daughter of Richard Whitmire, author of The Bee Eater, a book lavishing praise on Michelle Rhee.

By 2010, Oregon SFC staff was pushing for support of a bill to increase charters and cyber-schooling. Oh, and SFC was now advocating a decrease in the capital gains tax. Former actual parent SFC member Tom Olson explained the last straw came with new SFC staff:

We were appalled that [Sue Levin] had virtually no experience leading grassroots organizations. Instead, we were told that she had a truly impressive background as an “entrepreneur” (a phrase we began to hear [CEO Edelman] use quite frequently during [his] transformation during 2009–10). Levin had been the founder and CEO of a women’s apparel company, Lucy Inc. Prior to that, she had been a women’s sports apparel VP at Nike Inc. Grassroots leadership experience? Absolutely none. Connections with millionaires? A whole bunch.

SFC became a big promotional partner for Waiting for Superman. They stood up to defend the Common Core across numerous states. And they advocated hard for charters and for anti-tenure, anti-union policies. SFC was out in ten states, so there are many stories.

Kenn Libby and Adam Sanchez put together a history of Stand For Children that ran in the Fall 2011 issue of Rethinking Schools. At that point, one of SFC's most recent "accomplishments" was its work in Illinois, where they were brought in to help bust the union. At Aspen in 2011, Edelman suffers an extraordinary attack of Damn I Forgot That The Internet Is a Thing and lays out in a panel discussion caught on video just how they did it, and it's an interesting explanation of how well-moneyed advocates could separate Democrats from usual constituents. Edelman is pretty blunt-- he explains at one point how officials were simply political tools to achieve the goal of "tilting" Speaker Madigan. He's also pretty blunt about how he managed the teachers:

After the election, Advance Illinois and Stand had drafted a very bold proposal we called Performance Counts. It tied tenure and layoffs to performance. It let principals hire who they choose. It streamlined dismissal of ineffective tenured teachers substantially—from two-plus years and $200,000 in legal fees, on average, to three to four months, with very little likelihood of legal recourse.

And, most importantly, we called for the reform of collective bargaining throughout the state—essentially, proposing that school boards would be able to decide any disputed issue at impasse...

We hired 11 lobbyists, including the four best insiders and seven of the best minority lobbyists, preventing the unions from hiring them. We enlisted a statewide public affairs firm. . . . We raised $3 million for our political action committee between the election and the end of the year. That’s more money than either of the unions have in their political action committees.

And so essentially, what we did in a very short period of time was shift the balance of power. I can tell you there was a palpable sense of concern, if not shock, on the part of the teachers’ unions in Illinois that Speaker Madigan had changed allegiance, and that we had clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down their throats, the same way the pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier.

Throat-jamming has been a favored technique of SFC. In Massachusetts, SFC mounted a huge media campaign to push the idea of erasing tenure and seniority protections and won concessions from the teachers union by the old-fashioned technique of blackmail-- you can give us some concessions now, or we will throw our weight behind a ballot initiative that will be even worse. As a further sign of their astro-turfy nature, they promptly vanished once their work was done.

By the time the current decade had rolled around, all traces of the original group and its original priorities had vanished. In 2011, Texas faced serious budget problems and the prospect of serious education budget cuts. The old SFC would have advocated for protecting schools and children from those cuts; the new SFC was busy throwing its weight behind new teacher evaluation programs.

The current SFC Board of Directors is, well, unsurprising:

* Anne Marie Burgoyne, Chair. Holds an MBA from Stanford and is currently manages the social innovation initiative for the Emerson Collective, the reformy group headed by Steve Jobs widow (Laurene Jobs was on the SFC board back in 2006) and which hired Arne Duncan to do something-or-other.

* Emma Bloomberg. Michael Bloomberg's oldest daughter, and chief of staff at the Robin Hood Foundation (founded by Paul Tudor Jones, a hedge fund manager who dabbles in ed reform).
[Update: Bloomberg is no longer on the Robin Hood board, and has not been for almost two years. SFC's website has not been updated to reflect that. I have no idea what else they may have wrong.]

* Phil Handy, Treasurer. CEO of Winter Park Capital. Six years as Chairman of Florida State Board of Education under Jeb Bush.

* Eliza Leighton. Co-founder and now independent consultant. Left SFC in 2001 to get a law degree.

* David Nierenberg. An investment guy, now running his own firm after years of managing money for other people's firms.

* Lisette Nieves. Partner at Lingo Ventures, her own consulting firm. She's "an experienced social entrepreneur and public sector leader." Some government work, too, including Bloomberg appointee on NYC Board of Education.

* Don Washburn, Secretary. A private equity investor who has held executive positions at Northwest Airlines, Marriott Corp, and Quaker Oats.

In other words, not a single person with education credentials in the bunch. But they know a lot about investing money. Does it get any better if we look at the heads of their local affiliates?

Arizona's director's previous experience is help Jan Brewer push her education reform program. Colorado? Fifteen years as a "successful contract lobbyist." Illinois-- lawyers who worked for ed division of Tribune publishing. Indiana's head has background in communications and marketing, having helped shill for reformy Bart Peterson. Louisiana's director first joined SFC as Marketing and Communications Director. Massachusetts gets a Teach for America guy. Oklahoma's director was a journalist who moved into political communications work. Oregon's is former TFA, former KIPP, former Alliance for Excellence in Education, and a former aid to Senator Hillary Clinton. Tennessee doesn't have a state chief; the Nashville head is a former Obama administration liason for Department of Energy, and the Memphis head is a political activist and consultant. Texas and Washington don't have full staff presence.

In 2012, national leadership of SFC, "to ensure that we are maximizing our collective impact, ...decided to develop a shared viewpoint on how to accomplish our mission and to prioritize strategies that have proven effective in closing the achievement gap." In other words, "let's get everyone on the same page." The six-page manifesto is relatively harmless, even as it uses plenty of reformster dog whistles.

But words are cheap, and Stand For Children may be many things these days, but cheap they are not. I spent my Saturday morning reading up on them because they have surfaced twice this week, in both cases busy trying to buy themselves some democracy.

In Washington State, SFC is trying to buy itself a judge. See, the current judge, the one they'd like to buy a replacement for, had the temerity to rule Washington's charter law, the charter law that charter supporters paid lots of good money to get passed, unconstitutional (Mercedes Schneider has the painful details). Sigh. This is the sort of thing that should bother you even if you don't even care a little about education-- for these folks, laws and democracy are just obstacles to getting their way. Want a particular law passed? Just buy the law you want, and if that isn't enough, buy the judge that will interpret the law the way you'd like it. So Stand For Children is funneling three quarters of a million dollars of reformster money into the judge's race (meanwhile, that judge who is not being backed by funders from across the nation, has about $30K to defend herself with-- if you would like to help her with that, here's the link).

Meanwhile, in Tennessee, spent (or passed through) another $700K to buy itself some Nashville school board members. At Dad Gone Wild, you can read just how far off the rails that effort has gone (it appears that SFC is a little muddied on PAC and campaign law).

I confess to some mystification. How did a guy with such a child-centered, activist background become such a tool of corporate interests? How did a group that started with Rosa Parks saying, "If I can sit down for justice, you can stand up for children" end up being a group that doesn't stand for much of anything except stacks of money wielded like political clubs? How do these folks decide that law and democracy are simple obstacles to be leveraged and used, cast aside or buried under stacks of cash? Watch Edelman in that video-- children aren't even on the radar.

Reformsters like to say that you can't fix schools by throwing money at them, but they sure do like to throw money at politics and politicians. I suppose it is somehow comforting to believe that everyone can be bought when you yourself have long since sold out.


*I initially posted the wrong brother's name (Josh) instead of Jonah.

NY: 2016 Opt Out Remained Huge

The report on 2016 testing is out, and the bottom line is this:

Despite various state attempts to pressure, brow-beat, threaten, cajole, and distribute a huge case of the PR-spin whirlies, the opt out numbers in NY actually went up.

The increase is marginal-- in 2015, 20% did not test, and in 2016, 22% did not test.

But then, in 2015 the state was caught somewhat flatfooted by the opt out movement and could barely get its response together. In 2016 they were prepared from the moment 2015's numbers came out. By November, state education boss, the ostensibly kinder, gentler MaryEllen Elia, the woman who was going to be less off-putting and parent-enraging than John King, had distributed testing propaganda kits to superintendents. There were legal threats. There was even a fake task force assigned to make all the moms and dads settle down.

Boy, with a whole year to lean on parents, things were going to go better.

And heck, from out here in the cheap seats, it looked like even the opt outers were unsure. There was very little crowing and predicting another defeat for NY testing forces.

Nevertheless, defeat arrived.

The report trumpets some increases in proficiency across the state, but what does that even mean? It was a different test, with a cut score set according to the usual mysterious voodoo formula.

And more than one in five New York students did not take it.

One in five.

The test results are meaningless. And the Big Standardized Test of New York is, for the second year, pointless.

Free Marketing Schools

Free market fans envision a story something like this:

Finding themselves in a world where the power of the free market is unleashed, charters, private, and public schools all become transparent, competing with each other to be able to publish the finest student outcomes. Empowered consumers/parents study up on the student outcomes published by each school so that they can weigh the merits of each school and make the best selection for their children.

If this fairy tale ever came to pass, education would be the first sector of the free market to ever function in this fashion. Go turn on your television right now and wait for an advertisement that is a factual, data-based account of the effectiveness of the product. Wait for an advertisement that does not try to imbue the product with a personality or identity, even if products corn flakes and cleaning fluids do not naturally display any personality traits. Okay-- you shouldn't actually wait for any of that, because you will get old and die before you actually succeed.

Let me repeat what is perhaps my most-repeated observation on this blog.

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

Now we have an academic study from the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Perceptions of Prestige: A Comparative Analysis of School Online Media Marketing," by Sarah Butler Jessen (Bowdoin College) and Catherine DiMartino (Hofstra University) is a working paper that looks at how marketing plays out in a couple of education markets.

The paper is about setting up a framework for comparing branding and marketing practices, comparing the practices of different types of schools in "choice settings."

Jessen and DiMartino draw on lots of literature studying the use and practices of branding and marketing in the world at large (because, as everyone with eyeballs has noticed, that's what actual free markets are loaded with) as well as education-specific material. Since choice systems have required schools to distinguish themselves in order to win customers, some researchers have already started looking at how that is done. Branding communities, for instance, build a whole culture around a school mascot and school logo.

Researchers have found that shared personal values and life experiences–usually gleaned from personal interactions and word-of-mouth recommendations—attract parents to particular schools rather than the actual academic performance of the school.

In other words, families are inclined to send their children to schools serving families much like their own-- one more reason that choice is likely to make segregation worse rather than better. Jessen and DiMartino also note that "proximity to home and after-school opportunities" are big draws for choosing schools.

Jessen and DiMartino note that research (going all the way back to 2002) shows that choice systems combined with test-driven accountability lead to schools that market precisely toward "better" students who will improve the school's numbers (and market to discourage those who would lower the school's performance profile). The push for slick, glossy marketing also drains resources, or leaves public schools unable to compete in the marketing arms race. The call for marketing also changes the role of the school administration, which now needs to be concerned not just with the usual in-house issues of running a school, but must also worry about marketing and "image management."

But what would that marketing actually look like? Jessen and DiMartino shift here to the world of business.

Research from that world suggests that for "experience" goods (those for which the quality has to be experienced to be believed) advertising and marketing are about finding ways to signal quality. A common and effective way to signal quality is pretty simple-- spend a lot of money on the ads. Make sure they are slick, shiny, and polished. Then make sure that the customer encounters them often. Examples of this principle in action are everywhere. How do consumers "know" that Coke and Pepsi are classier and higher-quality than, say, RC or Faygo? After all, we're talking about carbonated, artificially flavored water-- quality is not really an issue. Yet we see Coke and Pepsi ads constantly, and always featuring high-gloss slick production values, and so somehow we "know" that Coke and Pepsi are the highest-quality carbonated artificially-flavored water out there.

Those kinds of signifiers of quality are definitely "suboptimal information," but even more likely to come into play with education because not only is an experienced good, but the people who actually experience it may not be ready to evaluate it for years afterwards (most teachers have a story about a returning student who says, "Yeah, years and years ago when I had you in class, I hated it. But now I'd just like to thank you, because I finally see the benefit of what you did"). On top of that, the person doing the selection-- the parent-- isn't even the person who is going to experience the good.

All of which means that the parents are susceptible to marketing and branding.

So, now the part where the actual studying was done.

Jessen and DiMartino looked at New York and Boston. They selected urban and suburban schools, divided into CMO (chain) charters, Non-CMO (individual stand-alone mom and pop) charters, public (non-charter) schools of choice, public schools, and private schools. Finding communities that included all five types turned out to be a challenge-- CMO charters were mostly not in the suburbs, and urban areas were short on public schools, and that's worth a bunch of consideration all by itself, but let's move on.

Jessen and DiMartino considered the school web site, the school's YouTube presence, and any activity on social media (Facebook and Twitter). And they threw in some analysis of published mission statements for good measure.

There was big data to be wrung from the school websites. Here's a handy chart from the paper (used with permission):

 The "autonomous web site" 0% for CMO charters comes from the CMO habit of embedding all individual schools in the chain in the mother ship's website. If you're going to maintain the integrity of the brand, can't run the risk of individual schools going off-message.

As a Firefox user, I'm not sure that flash graphics qualify as a Good Thing; nevertheless, you can see the overall pattern. Charter chains do a great deal of well-managed marketing of their brand, much of which has absolutely nothing to do with how good a job they do at providing an actual education to students.

Jessen and DiMartino also break down the language of mission statements, which yields it own interesting data set. CMOs overwhelmingly favor academic language, followed by a bit of character, while the other four school categories include academics, but also used a great deal of language related to character and community (for CMOs, "community" doesn't make the cut at all). Only public schools brought up citizenship.

When it comes to YouTube, CMOs are also smoking everyone else. 91% of CMOs had their own YouTube channel (82% with carefully branded colors), and 73% had channels with professionally created videos. Even private schools were far behind this (50% with channels, 13% with pro videos). Public (non-choice) schools are just sad-- only 11% had a YouTube channel, and nobody had pro videos (presumably nothing but videos from band concerts and football games taken by somebody's mom).

Curiously, while CMOs lead the pack when it comes to Twitter, almost every type of school is catching on Facebook (CMOs, 100% and public non-choice schools, 77%). This perhaps confirms independent research from my classroom, where a very loosely researched study resulted in the finding "Dayum, Mr. Greene. Nobody uses Facebook any more. Facebook is for your mom." It should also be noted that while almost everyone is on Twitter, not everyone knows what to do there, with CMOs way ahead of the pack in followers and in the use of hashtags to mobilize their people.

So what conclusions can we draw?

Jessen and DiMartino note that some high-powered public schools in wealthy communities may not market much because their reputation is plenty effective. And I would add that there's still a non-zero portion of the public school sector that is leery of all forms of social media because of student privacy issues.

Nevertheless, many of the charters, particularly the charter chains, are marketing, and marketing hard. The writers note that Success Academy's YouTube channel has at least 131 videos, most professionally produced. That's not cheap. But then, by looking through old tax forms, the writers also found that Success Academy spent $700,000 on PR firms in just one year, as well as $418,718 to Mission Control Inc., a direct mailing firm that has also worked for NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and the House Majority PAC. Plus printing fliers, buying mailing lists, etc etc etc. And you can bet that none of this is being done by some principal's secretary in the gap between submitting the daily attendance report and checking lunch money lists. What's the takeaway here?

Schools with more money invested in their Web sites, their promotional videos, and their social media outlets stand to be perceived as being of higher quality by parents, students, and investors alike. CMO-run charter schools present a much more professional face in these online media outlets than other schools in the public sector. CMO Web sites are matched for sophistication and polish only by elite private schools, but with very different messaging. Such investment in marketing raises anew fundamental questions about the perception and reality of public education.

Let me add to that. First of all, when Jessen and DiMartino say "more professional face," that doesn't mean the face of a professional educator. It's the face of a professional marketer, an advertising professional.

Second, that's a whole pile of financial resources being spent on marketing instead of being spent on educating students. And while some of those charters may well benefit from the largesse of investors, mostly we're talking about advertising paid for with taxpayer education dollars. The state said, "Hand over some of your money so that we can educate the citizens of tomorrow" and then then charters turned around and spent that money on a professional photographer to take pictures to go in the glossy brochure packed in envelopes and mailed out by a professional direct-mailing firm-- all of it paid for with tax dollars that were earmarked for education.

Third, let's go back to the free market argument for charters. Charters would lead to competition, and while the implication has always been that the competition would be about who could run the best school, develop the best programs, hire the best teachers, and just generally do the best job educating students. Instead, the competition is to see which school can do the best job of marketing, spend the most money on professional advertising services, create the best branded image of their product.

That is certainly competition, but it is certainly not competition that will get us better schools.

Other Suns and the Illusion of History

It was impossible to drive across the country without thinking of Isabel Wilkerson's masterpiece The Warmth of Other Suns, a stunning telling of the story of the Great Migration.



Wilkerson weaves numerous threads together (including those of her own life) and shifts effortlessly between close focus and the larger picture, but the book revolves around the stories of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Starling, and Pershing Foster, as each of them makes their own personal journeys. The Great Migration was an unprecedented shift of population in this country and, as Wilkerson says, "it was the first big step the nation's servant class ever took without asking."

I won't try to capture the entire book, but I will share some of what hit me when reading it.

Some were simple factoids. The first Jim Crow law? Passed in Massachusetts.

Some of it echoes our present. Foster's parents were educators, and the picture of black schooling in the South is brutal. For instance, on the matter of financing schools:

"The money allocated to the colored children is spent on the education of the white children," a local school superintendent in Louisiana said bluntly. "We have twice as many colored children of school age as we have white, and we use their money. Colored children are mighty profitable to us."

And perhaps most striking and effective because of Wilkerson's thoroughness, is the ordinary everydayness of the racism these people lived through.

Travel always makes me think of the book because of Foster's story. At one point, this educated physician sets out to drive cross country, heading out West to create a new life, and the simple business of trying to find a place to eat or a hotel in which to stay is an insurmountable challenge. It's such a simple thing for a man to drive up to a hotel or motel and get a vacant room, but it's a simple comfort that is denied him. When my wife and I traveled, one of the things we could take for granted was the ability to get a room or some food wherever they presented themselves. I think of Dr. Foster, turned away from room after room, and I am angry that such crap happens, ever happened at all.

Foster's story also quietly rebukes the notion of meritocracy. Foster does everything that is supposed to get ahead. He gets an education, he does good work, and he is still defined and limited by both individuals and the system because he is black.

The book pierces one of the great illusions of history. Often we look back and it seems that, well, that thing happened Way Back Then, but this is now, and somewhere in between there was a break, a jump, a change, and now we live in Other Times, cut free and disconnected from those earlier days.

But to really study history, we see this is not true at all. The Great Migration did not end until 1970, and the lives of these people did not end until decades after that, and yet the roots of their stories are in the slave days of America. Ida Mae Gladney came to Chicago eighty years ago, and yet was forced to settle in the same neighborhoods where black Americans are still held down today.

Perhaps my generation is more prone to say, "Well, you know, this country once had terrible racial problems, but now we're pretty much past all that." But Wilkerson patiently takes us essentially year by year from slave days to the present, checking each year, noting "Well, that break didn't happen this year. How about this year? No? Well, let's check the next one." Until the conclusion becomes inescapable. The break never happened, and racism and racial injustice stretch through US history in a long, unbroken line.

There is no big break in the road that leads us to the world where a major television commentator explains that the slaves who built the White House were really quite happy and fortunate. Or a world in which an entire schooling philosophy is built on, "What poor children of color need is an environment of strict discipline in which they learn to be obedient and compliant. That's the only thing that will work for Those Children." It's an illusion to imagine that there is some sort of gulf, some sort of tectonic plate shift that separates our present reality from our not-so-distant past, and a mistake to believe that the past can be ignored or dismissed, that it does not contain clues to the nature of our present and a better path toward our future.